


The Ceremony of Innocence

by lemmasyne



Category: Supernatural
Genre: First Time, M/M, Season/Series 15, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:28:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27368062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemmasyne/pseuds/lemmasyne
Summary: Sam's brooding, Jack’s making a love potion, and Dean won’t talk about his feelings. Five days in the life.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Jack Kline/Sam Winchester
Comments: 18
Kudos: 66





	1. Monday

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [with my hands on heaven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26711509) by [hellhoundsprey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellhoundsprey/pseuds/hellhoundsprey). 



> AU from 15.15, “Gimme Shelter”. Jack/Sam inspired by hellhoundsprey’s “with my hands on heaven”.

The morning Jack comes back, Sam finds him at the kitchen table with a bowl of muesli and the sugar jar by his elbow. In his grey sweatshirt, with his cowlick falling over his forehead, he looks serene, and Sam finds his throat closing up with sheer relief.

"It's done," Jack says.

“And everything’s okay?”

Jack smiles at him. "Yes. I'm well."

“We missed you. I was worried about you.”

“I know." He shrugs. "If I'd told you where I was going," Jack points out, "I would have been in more danger.”

"Yeah. It's okay. I know."

They sit in comfortable silence while Jack eats his cereal and Sam watches him eat. When he puts down his spoon, Sam says, "I need to hit town today. You need anything?"

Jack looks up at him, down at the table again, and flips the handle of his spoon so that milk splashes on the table. "“I’d like some herbs.”

"Herbs? Okay, sure. What kind?"

"Damiana leaf."

"Sure," says Sam. "That's Mexican, right?"

“It’s for a recipe."

Sam smiles at him, reassuring. "I guessed. What are you making?"

“Oh, I'm just – experimenting. Castiel's helping me."

“I didn’t know Cas could cook.”

Jack looks at him gravely. "He can taste every molecule in a single bite of food," he says, and Sam can't help smiling.

“Yeah, no, I know that. I didn't know it... translated. That's great. You need anything else?"

"Yes," says Jack, after a moment. "Muira palma. And, um, jasmine flower. If they have any."

"You know these are kind of obscure, right? I don’t know if I’ll be able to get them in town.”

Jack wilts. “Of course. Perhaps I should ask Mrs Butters.”

“Um, no," he says. "Don’t do that. I don’t even know how you’d do that.”

“Well, she did give me her phone number.”

“What the hell, she has a phone? Hey, no, it’s okay. I’ll try to find them. Maybe there’s a health food shop.”

Jack blesses him with a sunny smile. "Thank you," he says.

Sam writes the three herbs down in a note on his phone, and after them, he types, Ask Dean. Then he deletes it and types, ASK DEAN. When he stands up, Jack stands too, his hands hovering at his sides, a light flush in his cheeks. Sam's glad he's back. He is. He pats him on the shoulder. “I won’t be long. Tell Dean you’re back, okay?”

He goes down to the garage. Takes the Ford. Then he's out and it's morning and the clouds over the lake are still glowing with the sunrise. The air is so clear he can see all the way across to the other side, and it must be freezing cold, but the car is warm. In the world, but not of it. He drives, and the roads are wide and empty, the fields are still speckled with dew.

He thinks about Jack for a while, his mind chasing the habitual worries that Jack's presence in the kitchen safe and sound does nothing to abate. Then he drifts. He dreamed in the night, and the dream was still in his mind when he woke up too early. He can't get a proper hold of it but he knows it was about Dean. It was about before – before the bunker, before Hell, before they knew about a hundredth of what they know about now.

He doesn’t remember that time very well. He remembers how things looked, like Dean leaning on the hood of the car, but the images are like photos in a drawer in the house of someone who’s died. He doesn’t remember how things felt, or what they meant. All he has are bits and pieces, relics, remnants. He knows that Dean loved him back then. That he was angry. And he can remember how the purr of the car used to make him feel like he was still sixteen, Stanford dissolving into a dream, and that he used to conflate the car and Dean, because both of them gave him the same feeling.

He doesn’t find the herbs in town, but he gets fresh vegetables, toilet rolls, pasta, bread, salt, and beer from the supermarket. Back at the car he feels guilty, so he goes back in and adds a random selection of spices in little jars. Then he gets himself a coffee too, and sits on the too-narrow hood of the car to drink it, watching families going into and coming out of the supermarket.

The sun's warming the tarmac, the wintry air. He takes off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves, watching the hairs on his forearm stand up. It’s a beautiful day.

*

Jack's still in the kitchen when he gets back, over by the hob, back turned to Sam. "Hey," Sam says. Jack doesn't reply. When Sam gets closer he finds he's busy toasting something unidentifiable over a Bunsen burner. He breathes out a long sigh. "What's going on?"

Jack's eyes flick to Sam's and he holds out a blackened thing between his tweezers. "I’m analyzing the potency of this muira puama.”

“You got some?”

Jack puts the blackened leaf directly into the flame of the burner and it flares pink. He sets it down with care in a small ceramic dish, and takes off his safety glasses. He smiles. "Mm-hm."

"You're doing all this for a recipe? Where d'you find it?"

Then Jack blushes. "In the storerooms. And I found dried leaves in a jar."

"Well, that's great. I couldn't find it in town. I should've known it would be somewhere in this place." He gives up, and smiles at Jack, and Jack beams back.

He smiles at Jack, and Jack beams at him. 


	2. Tuesday

“Jack’s – making some sorta potion.”

Dean’s eyes flick away from the road. “What?”

“He asked me for some weird herbs.” Sam shrugs. “Told me Cas was teaching him how to cook.”

“He did?” Dean’s smirking.

"It's serious."

“Hey, I know. Hell, let him do it. Only fun the kid’s having."

Sam looks away. "I thought you'd be the one to be worried."

"If I were gonna worry about him, I wouldn’t worry about him doing some kitchen chemistry.”

Sam looks back at him – studies the filigree of his eyelashes in the sunlight. It’s another beautiful day, and he thinks Dean might have liked to sit out by the car with a six-pack. He doesn’t suggest it. The sun glints in the trees; the leaves are almost all yellow now, bright against the blue sky. He thinks, as he does all the time, about what Cas must see when he looks at a landscape. What he must know about the weather, geology, the processes of erosion. The trees, the animals, the insects. Where all the birds make their nests.

*

In the afternoon he goes back to the books. That morning, while he was meant to be researching methods by which two human beings could hunt down, trap, and kill the omnipotent creator of their universe, he instead checked through all the sources on the index card for muira puama. He spent two hours looking at botanical drawings on parchment, finely inked and colored, but he didn't find anything. Only a note to a box in the archives.

It’s a dusty metal crate, like a mail container, with more old papers in – not parchment, but vellum. At the bottom there’s a rolled scroll, tied around with a pink ribbon, which Sam finds, when he runs it through thumb and finger, to be nylon.

Nylon was invented in the thirties. Clearly the scroll is older than that. This suggests that someone has unbound it and survived to tie a ribbon around it. This suggests it’s probably safe to do the same.

He piles the papers on the table, unties the ribbon and, using the pile of vellum as a paperweight for one end, unfurls the scroll. It's scripted in spiky, curlicued letters: the long words and lack of obvious pronouns looks like Latin, the spelling looks like Italian. It is, he guesses, Old Spanish, which allowing for orthographic differences is after all pretty much a dialect of Latin.

He drains his cup of coffee.

The title says, Composition of love. Below it there’s a list of items, maybe ingredients, in which he finds "marapuama", and, further down, "damiana leaf" and "jasmine". Then there's a box with an ornate border and a lot of lines written in the imperative. Mix, he thinks. Mystery verb. Stir, perhaps. Apply to the something of the beloved. "Huh,” he says, and jumps about a foot off the ground when Dean says,

“Found anything?”

He’s in the doorway with a tray – coffee and biscuits.

“Thanks. Uh, no. Nothing on Chuck. I know what’s Jack’s doing, though.”

Dean puts down the tray. “Shoot."

“He’s making a love potion.”

“What the fuck? Someone he wants us to meet?”

“I don’t know.”

*

Sam's noticed Jack looking at him. It’s not surprising that Jack looks at him, when there are only two others people in the bunker, not counting the occasional Cas. It’s not surprising that Jack looks at him a lot. But sometimes Jack looks up at him in a way that makes Sam feel like he’s standing on thin air. He gets a flush in his cheeks. He hovers. Sam knows what it means, even if he doesn’t want to know.

And so he talks to Jack. It doesn't go well.

*

Dean finds him in the library. This time he has beer and sandwiches.

“What’s up?”

“I talked to Jack.”

“Okay.”

“Sit down.”

Dean raises an eyebrow, but takes a seat near the head of the table. Sam sits down opposite.

“Jack made the potion for me.”

The emotions wash over Dean’s face one by one: confusion, bemusement, and anger. “What?”

“Yeah. I know.”

He watches the amusement creep in. Dean’s fiddling with the piece of pink ribbon, rolling it around his fingers, while the corner of his mouth turns up. “Never know what’s ‘round the corner, do you, Sammy?”

Sam, obediently, smiles.

“I talked to him.”

“What’d he say? He told he has a – a thing for you?”

“Yeah.” He shrugs. “More or less.”

He leans back in his chair, watching Dean watch him.

“So what? You gently disabused him?”

“I told him it’s not bad to feel the way he does.”

He reaches for the beer.

*

That night the dreams must get bad again because he wakes to Dean in his doorway, silhouetted against the light that spills in from the corridor. “Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

He sits up in bed, knowing that Dean will come to him if he gives the sign, sit beside him with a hand on his leg until he can sleep again.

“M’fine.”

Dean’s got the bottle of Jack. It was Dad’s drink, but it never looks wrong to see it in his hand. “Okay,” he says. “Sleep tight, Sammy.”

He lies awake for a while, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Jack's face when he tried to tell him he understood, and about his aborted, unsatisfactory conversations with Dean. He's known (deep down) for a while what Jack wants from him, but sometimes he wonders what Dean feels about him now. These days, Dean doesn’t even patch him up – what’s whiskey and stitches to angelic healing? They don’t touch. They don’t spar. They don't talk.

He thinks maybe it's better that way.


	3. Wednesday

Jack's in hiding. He's not in the kitchen, the library, or the archive room, and when Sam knocks on his bedroom door, there's silence. "Jack?" He knocks again, and then pushes the door gently open to find the room empty. Jack’s bed is neatly made, his pajamas in a pile on the pillow. The space smells of nothing.

He looks in the basement, the control room, and the garage, and calls Jack’s name outside the bathrooms and the showers. He checks the computer room, the war room, the storage rooms, the shooting range, and the dungeon. He wanders down corridors he hasn’t been down in months.

He finds Dean back in the kitchen. “I can’t find Jack.”

"Did you see him go out?"

“Don’t think so.”

“Well, where’s he gonna be?”

“This place is huge. I think doesn’t want to talk to us. And if that’s true he could be anywhere.”

Dean continues eating his bacon and eggs. “Keep looking, I guess. Or leave him in peace.”

“ _Dean_ ,” he says.

“I’m sure he’s fine. Seriously, Sam. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s just feeling awkward as all hell.”

“Jesus,” says Sam. “It's more important than that. You really don’t give a damn about him, do you?” He doesn’t actually mean to say it, and when Dean’s face flashes hurt and goes blank, he repents, too late. “Sorry.”

“Just get to the library, will you?”

He doesn’t go the library. He goes back to Jack’s bedroom. He doesn’t really know why he’s so concerned – Jack hasn’t left the bunker, and he’s probably sitting in a storage room Sam doesn’t know, feeling bad because his crush rejected him, because he’s at least halfway a human teenager who does human things. And maybe he's thinking about what Sam told him - that feelings like the ones he's feeling right now are normal, natural, and not something to be ashamed of.

Sam hopes that's what he took away from their conversation, and not the fact that Sam was pretty clear that a love potion was not the best way to go about addressing those feelings. Really, a love potion was probably the worst idea he could have had. He thought the way into Sam’s heart was to roofie him? But that isn't what matters.

What matters is that Sam supports him.

He finds Jack in the alternate living quarters, curled up on the alternate sofa. And he tries, but Jack gets pale and sad, and Sam finds it increasingly hard to force himself to say the sentences he'd planned out. He realizes the quarters remind him of one of Chuck’s other universes: mostly the same, but different where it matters. Like him – Sam versus the man he thought he’d be.

*

They’re sitting out by the car. This time Dean packed the cooler and the deckchairs.

“I can’t do it.”

Dean’s eyes are far away. He doesn’t turn his head. He says, “Can’t do what?”

“This. Any of it. Kill God. Kill Amara. Look after Jack. I can’t.”

“Yeah,” says Dean. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Yeah, it is.” Dean’s eyes don’t move from the horizon. “Of course it’s my fault, Sam.”

It’s cooler today, and there’s rain in the wind. The breeze is in the ripples on the lake, the dead leaves by the verge, ruffling Dean’s hair.

Dean says, “If I hadn’t made you stay.”

“What do you mean, made me stay? You mean Gadreel?”

Five years later, and he really didn’t think they were ever going to talk about Gadreel.

“Earlier. Gadreel too, Sammy. But you know it didn’t start then.”

Sam frowns at his own hands, the skin bleached by the sunlight. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I kept you, Sam. I shouldn’t have. I should have let you go.”

“You never kept me. Everything that threatened the world – Cas, the Leviathans, Abaddon, whatever the hell else, I don’t even remember – you think at any point, ever, I could have left? You think you were the thing keeping me?”

“I didn’t see you come back for anything else.”

He sits. Dean’s quiet – sad and tired. It breaks Sam’s heart, although Dean would never believe that. That Dean kept him in this life is one of the truths between them. If it hadn’t been for Dean, he would have got out, somehow.

It’s one of their truths. It’s not the whole truth. It’s what Dean believes.

“What do you want?” says Sam.

Dean raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“What do you want?”

He watches Dean grin. “I want another beer.”

He sits. He’s quiet now, and he watches Dean in his periphery, looking at him in his own periphery. He watches Dean swallow.

Dean says, “You know me.” It sounds to Sam like a deathbed confession. “it’s like – Amara said. My whole life I’ve been waiting for things to go back to the way they were before Mom died.”

“ _Amara_ said that?”

“Yeah. That diner outside Philly. When you were in the car.”

“And what, you’re saying it’s true?”

“Yeah, it’s true. I think it’s true. I’m not asking for – for sympathy, or something. I’m just saying she’s right. That’s what I’ve done for God knows how long. What I want, if I don’t want that – Jesus, I don’t know what I want.”

It starts to drizzle.

Dean says, “I want steak and Jack, Sammy. To – sleep with someone who wants no strings. Peace and quiet and no freaking apocalypses.”

“You want to hunt.”

“Yeah. I want to hunt. I want to drive. Eat. Sleep.”

He’s pretty sure Dean forced himself not to say, “Jerk off.”

“You want me.”

Dean looks at him. He looks like he’s waiting for a blow to fall. Still, it’s nice to see him in natural light. Sam finds that he’s smiling.

“You want me, Dean. You want us to retire together, go live by the beach, couple of beers each, sit like this all day.”

Dean’s eyes are clear and green. “No. That’s not what I want.”

He puffs out a breath. “Okay.”

Dean looks away, out over the lake. He says, to the water and not to Sam, “I want you to be happy.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah.”

“I know it’s not the answer you want.”

“It’s not true, is the kind of answer it is. You don’t want me to be happy, Dean – you want me to be happy _in this life._ You know that’s different, right? You know that?”

Dean, finally, looks at him again. Maybe he wasn’t talking to the lake and the trees and himself instead of to Sam. Maybe he just didn’t want to look at him, because now that they’re looking at each other Sam feels like something in his chest is trying to break itself in half. “I know.”

“You don’t know,” says Sam. “But it’s okay.”

It’s probably not okay. But it’s the closest he and Dean are going to get.

He traces his index finger up Dean’s arm, and Dean tenses, but lets him. He says, so low Sam almost doesn’t catch it, “I like it when you need me.”

Sam tips his head. “I know.”

“God help me, Sammy.”

He stands up and takes a step towards Dean’s chair. Dean takes the hint. He stands too, and hugs him, and the rain gets heavier, falling on their collars, drumming on the roof of the Impala.

"You know,” he says, “muira puama is an indigenous herb.”

Dean adjusts his grip to hold him more tightly. “What?”

“The Guaycura used it. In Mexico. They traded with the Aztecs, but the Spanish didn’t conquer the Aztecs ‘til the sixteenth century. So why’s it in a recipe written in medieval Spanish?”

Dean’s hand is in his hair, smoothing it down. “No freaking idea, Sammy. Spill the beans.”

It's raining hard. Dean’s own hair is covered with silver droplets. “Because it’s a fake,” he says. “Eighteenth century, probably – that’s when they were selling muira puama first.” He feels Dean smiling into his shoulder.

“You’re saying it’s wasn’t a real love potion?”

“Might be. But it’s nothing to do with medieval witchcraft. Probably herbal medicine.”

Dean hand to God nuzzles his collar. “Such a nerd,” he says. “Still such a fucking nerd.”

From somewhere across the lake, lightning flashes.


	4. Thursday

“I need to tell you something.”

“Okay,” says Dean. The corners of his eyes crease. “That’s not at all worrying.”

“Last night Jack and I slept together.”

Silence. Dean’s right hand clenches, unclenches on the steering wheel. He says, “What?”

“Yeah. It’s – I don’t know what to say, Dean. I don’t know what to say.”

The rumble of the engine is very loud.

Sam watches the telephone wires as they pass by overhead in steady, unbroken lines. He says, “Jack’s not actually a kid. I don’t know what kind of mental age approximates his, and I don’t know what his… his mind is really like. I know that. But I know that he can make decisions. He… wanted it.”

Dean says, “He wanted you.” There is no expression in his voice.

“He _wants_ me. Present tense. He wants this. Present tense. Dean, he’s happy right now. When’s the last time that was true?”

Dean’s still silent. Sam thought before he saw something like sympathy in his face, and he was wrong. It’s unsurprise. And now the muscle in his jaw’s standing out like it’s going to make a break for it. “What the _hell_ , Sammy?”

He looks at Sam and Sam stares him down until he looks away again. They’re lucky the backroads are empty.

He says, “What do you want me to say?”

And he’s aware that as an answer, it’s lacking something. Like, adequacy. Really, it’s not that he thinks Dean’s being unreasonable. He thinks he’s probaly a reasonable degree of angry right now. It’s just that he doesn’t, for one thing, have the energy to meet that anger, and he also doesn’t have a real answer. He doesn’t _know_ the real answer to “What the hell, Sammy?”.

This is how it happened.

Jack knocked on the door of his bedroom. He was wearing a black tank and Sam felt something hot and horrible clench inside him.

Jack knocked on the door of his bedroom. Sam knew it wasn’t Dean from the timorousness of the knock. Knew it was Jack from something else. He let him in. Jack was wearing a black tank, like a gym shirt, and something twisted in Sam’s stomach when he pushed his hair off his forehead. He said, “Hello, Sam.” He sounded like Cas. Younger, of course. Absurdly young. Sweatpants and bare, lightly muscled arms.

Jack knocked on the door of his bedroom. His nipples were visible under his tank, sweet little nubs that Sam wanted to palm and then suck on. Yeah, he wanted that.

Jack knocked on the door of his bedroom. Jack had said, “it’s okay.” He hates to think of it, but at the time it had felt true: and he couldn’t bring himself to try to talk to Jack for a third time. Talking to him meaning supporting him, supporting him meaning be a father to him. He couldn’t do it. He told Dean that. He should have done it, but he couldn’t. So he went with it.

It was easier to lift Jack up than to get a stiff neck ducking his head to kiss him. Jack’s legs were around his waist, his back against the wall. Later Sam fucked him on the bed, as gently as he knew how to. Jack had stretched himself already. He had fingered himself in his room. He told Sam that matter-of-factly. Sam fucked him on his back with his knees up and his own face pressed against Jack's shoulder.

Jack came without Sam touching him, just from Sam inside him, and Sam’s tastes in porn might not have stretched to much male-on-male anal sex, but he knew that was – something.

The comforter had lube and Jack’s come on it. His own was inside Jack. It was a pretty terrible thought, but right then he felt empty and blissful, and Jack was holding onto his hand, and it felt like a fucking gorgeous thought. He wanted to lay Jack down again and take his time until Jack was crying out, and then he wanted Jack to lay beside him again and look even more beatific.

He took Jack to the shower and they stood under the spray together. Sam used the old sponge – the real sponge, from the fifties – to wash him clean. Jack stood on tiptoe to kiss him again, and as the water fell around them Sam had the strangest feeling Dean was watching him. He couldn’t speak. But he squeezed Jack’s arm and felt, wrongly perhaps, that Jack understood.

*

He and Dean are in the car. It’s the morning after.

Dean’s musing aloud. He’s saying, “You banged the guy who’s in puppy love with you. Oh wait – the nephilim who’s in puppy love with you. The nephilim. Who _lives_ with us. Smart move, Sammy. Real smart.”

After they’ve gone a mile he repeats it. Well, different words, same sentiment.

“Yeah,” says Sam this time. “That’s the situation.”

“Well, that’s just great, Sam. That’s just peachy. That’s exactly the situation I was hoping for this week. Let’s make things a whole lot more complicated. ‘Cause that’s what _everyone_ was hoping for.”

He shrugs. “Killing God is pretty complicated already.”

Dean stares through the windshield like he’s hoping to burn a hole in it.

Twenty miles later he says, “I didn’t even know you slept with guys.”

“I don’t.”

“What – Jack’s your first?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

He sees Dean roll his eyes and flattens his palm on the passenger window. He watches the road. 

Dean says, “I thought we were—”

“You thought we were good? We are, Dean.”

“We said no more secrets.”

‘Yeah, and this isn’t a secret. I didn’t want it to become a secret.”

Dean says, “You’re saying it wasn’t premeditated.”

“Well, yeah. It wasn’t.”

Dean turns to him again. Sam wants to tell him to look at the road, but it wouldn’t help. Anyway, he trusts him. He has no real choice in that matter. Dean says, “And do you regret it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

Dean’s never understood ambivalence; he lives both feet in or both feet out. But he is, Sam knows, used to not understanding him. The anger’s seeping out of him already. It’s a small blessing, but Sam will take it. And he wonders if some weather god is blessing them, because it starts to rain again. Heavy on the tarmac, dazzling sheets of it in the sunlight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While writing this I discovered that Alexander Calvert is 30. THIRTY.


	5. Friday

Jack is gone again. It’s okay; he’s with Billie. Dean says, “He’s powering up again, huh?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“You think he’s gonna be okay? Think we should go with him?”

“It’s too late now.”

Dean only said it to placate him. It isn’t that he doesn’t care, it’s that he doesn’t care _enough_. That’s what his failure consists of.

Sam pours him a cup of coffee.

It’s been a long time since Dean cared enough about people that weren’t Sam. Sam’s dwelt on it for a while, sitting up in bed in the dark, head tipped back against the cold brick wall. He doesn’t delude himself that it’s healthy. He does think it’s important.

He figured out one thing back then – they’re in the endgame now. Their world used to be fuller, and now it’s very small, and he thought that if he just knew how he and Dean were meant to stand to each other now then maybe he’d be somewhere

He spends the day in the library. It’s cold, even in the bunker. The air has a frigid snap to it that makes Sam think it might be frosty outside. He crosschecks the spells in Rowena’s last list against all the other places they’re recorded, and notes the discrepancies for future investigation. Killing God, killing time. He thinks about Jack.

It took until the small hours last night for him to think about what had happened the night before. He didn’t think anything after Jack had gone back to his room; in fact he got into bed and fell straight asleep, and dreamt something about driving through a swamp in the Impala, except that the car had hardwood floors like the bunker and he and Dean were both wearing tuxedos, and maybe he wasn’t in the car, maybe he was following Jack up a spiral staircase, unfamiliar and smelling of stone. Last night, though, he opened his eyes at three in the morning to perfect wakefulness and the thought of what he’d done to Jack.

Sam wants someone to be a parent to, that doesn’t mean Jack needs him to be a parent. Maybe Jack _needs_ a parent, but it’s still clear to him now that Jack viewed him, Sam, in a different way. In a muddling way, Jack tried to show him that. He must have known the potion described in the scroll wasn’t magical, which means, it was gestural.

He realized at about half past three last night that he had tried to parent Jack through Jack’s own re-articulation of their relationship as an entirely un-parental one. No wonder Jack clammed up. He, Sam, couldn’t sustain that fiction, and so when Jack came to him he did what he should never have done, and kissed Jack back.

He sure as hell couldn’t face what he’d done on Wednesday night on Thursday, when he told Dean. Now that he has, the guilt is what he knew it would be. He accepts the feeling – he welcomes it. He still doesn’t know where it leaves him and Jack.

He thinks about him. He thinks, unwillingly, about Dean.

He has the unshakeable feeling that the two thoughts are connected.

*

Fifteen years ago, he’d never doubted that he loved Dean. But it got more complicated when _loving_ came to mean _willing to sacrifice_. The more you loved, the more you were willing to sacrifice. He told Dean once, “You’re my brother and I’d die for you,” and a little ripple of shock passed over Dean’s face. That was before thinking in terms of sacrifice was as natural as breathing.

*

It’s evening, and he’s washing the dishes. Dean’s flipping pancakes on the hob, and there’s a bottle of maple syrup on the table. When neither Cas nor Jack is there, and they’re not talking logistics, they eat in silence. Sometimes it’s lonely. Sometimes even the silence is too much.

The kitchen smells like onions and pancake batter. It’s a good smell.

Because Dean’s making pancakes, he has to stay in. What he wants to do, right now, still full of burgers, is to change his clothes and go run them all off. He’d take the trail through the woods, leaf litter and acorns under his feet, rain pattering on the canopy. It’s a full moon tonight, and it would be dappled silver on the damp soil, and beneath it he would be alone.

He’s sitting back at the table with his beer, and for the second time that evening, Dean is plating up. Sam moves his legs, makes space for him at the table. There’s something in him, maybe, that embraces the starkness of a life spent, in the end, with his brother. Dad would have appreciated its austerity. It’s about efficiency: nothing more than he needs.

He would never have doomed Eileen to an epilogue spent with him.

Dean says, “Wanna watch a movie?”

*

The evening wears on, and no sooner do the credits roll on _Raiders of the Lost Ark_ than Dean clicks through to _Temple of Doom_. Sam’s on his third beer. It’s been a long day. It’s been a long week.

They’ve become less concerned with maintaining the distance between them on Dean’s bed and more concerned about seeing the laptop screen. Indy’s in the tunnel under Pankot Palace and Dean’s hand brushes his leg when he goes for the charger, and they’re closer than they’ve been in months, discounting approved hugs.

They’ve sat like this a thousand times, if not for a while. Sam’s wired, he’s rigged, to feel calm when Dean is next to him, ideally within touching distance. There’s an energy between them, though, that’s new, at least in its precise frequency. He knows with a detached kind of certainty that it’s because they have nothing much to lose now. That’s the answer to the question, “Why now?” When he leans into Dean’s hand on his arm. When Dean presses his face to his neck, demanding and undeniable, and Sam turns down the volume on the computer, and cups his jaw, brings his chin up to kiss him, flash of his tongue in Sam’s mouth hot and sweet like the taste of bourbon.

To the question, “What about Jack?”, he has no answer. It’s in the back of his mind – but it has no power to guide his actions.

He kisses Dean back, bearing him down onto the pillows, and Dean’s hands spread wide on his back. His stubble scrapes Sam’s jaw, and he’s warm. Hands in Sam’s hair, hand on the back of his neck. He breaks the kiss to cradle Sam’s face. His pupils are blown black, and he’s looking at Sam’s mouth. “Jesus,” he says. He sounds wretched. “Jesus, Sammy.”

They make eye contact. He touches Dean’s swollen, beautiful lower lip, and Dean’s tongue touches the pad of his finger, and he mouths at it, his top lip catching the nail. Sam breathes out, slowly, and lets his index finger find a path over the stubble on Dean’s chin, under his jaw, and down his throat. Pale and yielding: thyroid cartilage, jugular, trachea.

Dean’s hands are twisted in the back of Sam’s T-shirt. He’s only at half mast, but Sam finds when he grinds down the tell-tale jerk of his hips in response and a space between his thighs, like Sam’s already inside him. He rocks them together, dragging the bulge of his dick up and over the inner seam of Dean’s jeans, and Dean takes it. Arch of his back, a sound like he’s in pain when Sam thrusts against him.

Dean, instinctively domineering, who plays for Sam the ambivalent roles of protector and caregiver. Crushed underneath him it’s different.

He lets his forearm rest over Dean’s head, his fingers curving down to the hair above Dean’s ear. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” says Dean. His hand goes to Sam jaw’s again, thumb on his cheekbone. His face is relaxed, tired but open. Sam scratches his hand through his hair, runs the same hand down over his bicep, his forearm, and catches his wrist, and Dean looks at him as if he understands exactly what their bodies are saying to each other.

Maybe in one of the other universes he would think this had been a long time coming. As it is, he’s surprised they got here. He never expected this. Not _this_. Not how Dean feels, hot and soft and strong. And if he’d give this up for Sam, then there is nothing he wouldn’t do for him. 

He fucked Jack on Wednesday night and now the only thing he wants is to take the same thing from Dean. It’s fucking frightening.

He wants Dean’s dick, though. He realizes that when, kneeling over Dean, he sticks his hand in his boxers and strokes him and finds the weight and length of him, rock hard now and so fucking full and fat. He grinds down again and Dean’s legs are still open but now Sam can feel the way he’s pressing back, and he _wants_ it, Jesus, he wants it.

He’s never done this before. He doesn’t know how to prep himself. He looks down at Dean. “I need you to—” He can’t say it. Dean rests his palm on his knee.

“Spit it out.”

“Stretch me.”

Dean lifts himself up on his forearms. He runs a steady hand over Sam’s knee. He says, “Are you sure?” and Sam presses his palm to the front of his own jeans. He makes himself take a breath, bows his head so that his hair falls in his face and obscures the sight of Dean. Sam’s hard for him, Dean’s asking him if he’s sure, and in a minute he’s going to call him “Sammy” again: they’re here, and Sam feels, now, like they’ve been waiting months, years. He says,

”Yeah, I’m sure.”

He gets gets off Dean, stands, and strips off his jeans, shirt, and socks, and after a moment his boxers. Dean does the same, leaving his boxers on. He sits with his back to the headboard, and Sam sits on his lap without hesitating, and rubs against him, just because it feels good – Dean’s dick, compressed by fabric, sliding against the place behind his balls.

Dean uses a half-bottle of lube from the drawer in his bedside table. One finger at a time he breaches Sam, and Sam didn’t expect the clarity of the sensation of his fingers – his calluses, his knuckles – inside him. He can _feel_ him.

He feels his dick in the same way when Dean finally slides down his boxers and guides him down, inch by inch. The warmth of it, the vein standing out on the underside. He moans, and Dean must know it’s not in pain because he pulls him down the final inch so fast that their skin slaps together. He’s in, then, and Sam should probably move, or ride him, but he just wants to sit in Dean’s lap, their hips flush together, and rock himself up and down only the hairsbreadth that emphasizes the degree to which Dean fills him.

Dean’s about to speak, and Sam says, “Quiet.” Dean shuts his mouth, and looks up at him, his hair sticking up, heart-stoppingly beautiful. And eventually Sam moves. He rocks himself in a slow rhythm, finding out just how far out of him Dean can slide and still go back in without resistance. When he finds the length of the strokes, he shifts position and changes the angle, and the head of Dean’s dick brushes what must be his prostrate, because it’s a bright burst of pleasure, instantaneous.

So he uses Dean’s dick to get himself off, while Dean rests back on his own forearms, the muscles in his stomach and thighs taut as he holds himself still. His movements come easily and his hands fall to Dean’s shoulders, his thumb at the base of Dean’s neck. He’s shaken by what he finds in Dean’s eyes. It’s not what he wants to see – it’s too much, after everything. It feels like the brick walls are closing in. It’s partly fear, and his heart is hammering. Partly the feeling that something is trying to push its way out of his sternum. He can deal just fine with love as sacrifice, but not this.

He sinks down again, lifts himself up again: loses his mind in exactly what Dean’s dick feels like inside him. Until he can’t anymore, and the inexorable wave is threatening to break over him. He fists himself twice, three times, pushing his sweaty hair out of his eyes with his free hand so he can still see Dean when he comes. Bounces on Dean’s dick until his whole body tenses up too and, as Sam looks away, up at the white-plaster ceiling, he groans, and his balls contract and his dick jerks inside Sam. It’s over, and Dean’s hands are resting on his ass, not even squeezing, but holding him in place as securely as a ball and chain.

Sam slumps on top of him and Dean wraps him in his arms, sweat gluing their chests together. 

He’s already adjusting to the weird feeling of Dean soft inside him, but soon he slides off him so that they’re lying side-by-side. Beside him Dean’s bare chest rises and falls, and it’s the most comforting sight he knows.

He turns over. On the bedside table is the bottle of Jack, next to the lamp, Dean’s other knife, and three creased dollar bills. He takes the bottle and puts it down under the bed. His fingers tingle.

In the end he forces himself to get out of bed, while Dean watches with inscrutable eyes, and pick up his boxers from the floor, find his jeans and shirt. He never knows when Cas will be wandering the corridors. He goes back to his own room and sits on the edge of his bed. He doesn’t know how long he sits there.

When time begins passing again, he goes to the showers. He stands under the water for five minutes, and brushes his teeth. He puts on his pajamas and then, quietly, pads along the cold corridors back to Dean’s room.

The lamp’s off. Dean’s body, when his eyes adjust, is colorless in the dark; he’s on his stomach, the sheets baring the curve of his upper back. He’s so still that Sam finds himself locating the rise and fall of his breath in his shoulders. He feels affection for him rush past him like water. He’s awake now, making room for Sam in the bed. They don’t look at each other.

His new, solemn brother. His arm is round Sam’s shoulders, and the curve his body makes mirrors the one Sam’s makes.

When Sam rolls over onto his other side, Dean takes the hair off the back of his neck, and Sam feels his lips on the nape. He closes his eyes. Needing Dean is something he left behind a long time ago, and he doesn’t want it back. Dean says,

“Night,” and it’s heavy, like every other word between them now.

When he wakes up, everything will be the same as it was. The lines on Dean’s face, the old air in the Bunker.

*

He wouldn’t go back and change the way things happened, but that’s just because the way things happened is what made him who he is, and no-one wants to discard the person they are. If he were at the beginning, he would never have chosen this ending. Yet as it is, he would choose no other.

*

He dreams that he’s standing next to Jack on a high parapet above a blue ocean. There’s a hum in the air like the white noise of the highway through a motel window. The wind is lifting his hair. It feels like driving fast with the windows down.

He gets out of the car, and walks through a doorway into darkness, to where Dean is. He rests his head on the pillow next to his, and sleeps again.


End file.
